Survey: The Southwest Center for Microsystems Education

The Southwest Center for Microsystems Education, a National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education Center, is working on a project to better understand the state of the micro-nano based industry technician workforce. The goal of the project is to enable our center to best support Community Colleges’ efforts to start micro-nano technology programs that use SCME developed curricula.

One output of this project will be a map of locations of the related, hi-tech industries relative to their local Community Colleges so we can identify which are in a greater need for our programs. It will also allow us to have a picture of the hiring trend of various in order to support the Community Colleges decision to embrace such a program. Click here to view an early version of the map to date. As you can see, we have come a long way with creating a general map; now we need to use it to create value!

The second output will be a trend analysis of a sample of the mapped industries. The SCME has divided the micro-nano related industries into a 9 bracket matrix based on industry revenue and specialty. Our goal is to identify five companies in each bracket and, to determine their workforce needs so that we can target our educational impact efforts to yield the best results for both industry and education! These trends will be demonstrated to the Community Colleges near hi tech clusters, and will give them a justification for incorporating micro-nano based curricula into their programs. This will also validate additional NSF funding for this field, and enable SCME to distribute scarce resources into educational institutions where impact will be the highest. This is where we need your help! We have chosen your company to represent data within this bracket! Would you please complete the survey at http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22C2LDVG9MY

The findings will be shared with you so that you may understand educational resources that build your technician workforce pipeline and be in a better position to plan workforce growth. Please consider collaborating with SCME to support our shared industrial workforce educational improvement goals!